It's great that the government is being investigated for their actions, but it's a shame that it's seemingly limited to the IRS and not the various law enforcement agencies (eg. FBI/NSA/DHS). I guess the latter gets a free pass because "terrorism" and the former less politically popular (as evidenced by the budget cuts, despite having a net positive ROI on its budget).
The issue is that the IRS can spend e.g. $40 on enforcement to collect $100. But what they're really doing is auditing several totally innocent people to find someone who has significantly underpaid and covers the costs of the audits for the others. The problem with this is that it imposes expensive and extremely stressful audits on several totally innocent people, and if you count their side of the cost, the "profits" are totally destroyed. The taxpayer has a better expected value to eat the cost of a certain amount of tax fraud than to pay the higher cost of a certain number of fruitless audits.
Moreover, the purpose of the IRS is to collect money to fund government programs, not to collect money to fund IRS audits. The money spent doing audits is a dead-weight loss which can't go to programs. Meanwhile the ordinary IRS collection efficiency is >99%. Inverting that and doing audits until the efficiency fell to zero would be a tremendous increase in inefficiency and dead-weight losses, but that's where you would be if the metric was "positive ROI" from the perspective of the IRS.
>But what they're really doing is auditing several totally innocent people to find someone who has significantly underpaid and covers the costs of the audits for the others.
Is that's what's happening though? Although the budget cuts have reduced the amount of audits across the board, audits of the rich has dropped faster than everyone else[1]. Therefore, it's reasonable to assume that the rich has benefited from this policy more than the average joe.
Audits skew disproportionately to people with money to begin with because that's where the biggest potential gains are. That's also why there are audits of people receiving the EITC -- it has a high enforcement efficiency because that type of fraud is frequently unsophisticated and easy to uncover, but can amount to thousands a year.
The problem with audits of "the rich" is that the gains realized in practice often aren't that large, because their audits are the most expensive even if they have the most potential for uncovering fraud. So they go out and audit several "rich" small businesses, impose major costs on each of them, and uncover significant fraud in one. Which covers the costs of the IRS in doing the other fruitless audits, but not the costs of the other small business owners, who are understandably pretty upset at having to pay a bunch of uncompensated costs and their own time for an audit that didn't uncover anything.
What they ought to do is have the IRS compensate the subjects of an audit for their time and costs, but you can imagine how expensive that would be for the government. (It's already that expensive for the taxpayer.)
That's assuming people have any idea how many audits the IRS is doing, or will do at any point in the next few years/administrations, and are taking it into account when deciding whether to commit tax fraud. People don't work that way.
Also, they haven't actually stopped doing audits, so enjoy playing Russian Roulette with three bullets in the chamber. Still doesn't sound like a good idea even if there used to be four, does it?
Sure, people don't know the actual number, but they know that some enforcement is done, and some enforcement must be done for real for the effect to ripple through society. If you see your neighbour get away with it, it does entice you. The easy counterexample is Greece, where enforcement is notoriously low.
You don't need a warrant to get personal information held by third parties who willingly hand it over. The IRS isn't in the wrong here legally. If Congress actually cared they'd enact real data privacy laws with teeth.
Wasn’t the point of their comment “that give that data willingly”? If a company is constantly giving tips by choice, why wouldn’t the government be allowed to use it? Is the law written in such a way that the government can’t politely ask / be snitched to? I thought everything was fair game if a polite request was made and accepted.
I completely disagree with what they should be allowed to ask politely for; but, isn’t that the state of the world?
As another comment stated, this is only for CSLI data. Tracking data from a different third party is still fair game, and that's what the IRS was/is using.
That's kind of the point of a supreme court; the realization that it's impossible to get all of this stuff right in a legislative body and someone has to resolve the conflicts.
> That’s the purpose of the Supreme Court: a check on the legislature and executive branches.
This is correct, but not intended to be the source of law(1). In fact, Supreme Court decisions aren't a law per se, but a deterrent in creating legally questionable situations.
(1)A Supreme Court decision is made moot by legislation, as per any law, but the deterrent is significantly weaker in practice than a written law as it's scrutinized more closely as a matter of interpretation, court makeup, and public opinion.
> (1)A Supreme Court decision is made moot by legislation, as per any law
Minor nitpick: Not all decisions can be overridden by law. Cases dealing with constitutionality particularly. If the Supreme Court says something is a Constitutional right, only two things can overturn it: (1) a Constitutional Amendment, and (2) another Supreme Court decision[a].
[a] Brown v. Board, for example, overturned Plessy v. Ferguson[b]
[b] Well, not exactly. They didn’t say they were overturning that decision, but it made the old one moot by saying the opposite of it (leading to the same result).
A Constitutional Amendment is an "amendment" to a law (the Constitbution), although I would say that's the same as any other law insofar as it's a sum of written parts. Also, SC decisions are generally limited in some context, so there's no "need" to amend over it, as long as you can challenge again under a different political climate (court makeup or public opinion).
The same reason judicial decisions (especially appellate ones) applying those laws are also put in writing, and the same reason that such decisions are binding on lower courts, and considered persuasive though not binding authority for other courts in applying the same law.
Because that's what the courts rule based on, it's just that the initial version of the writing (the legislation) is often ambiguous so the courts add more writing over time.
Once again Ron Wyden seems to be one of the only members of congress who sees the dangerous path we are on with respect to data privacy and our government's Orwellian overreach. I would quit job tomorrow to work on this guy's presidential campaign.
It used to be until really recently that we showed respect for our elders.
In 7000 years of existence, most major cultures that survived gave hero-like status and higher offices to elders that survived to old age.
They were the source of knowledge, experience and truth.
It is only in our degenerate times in which we think 71yr olds are more than a hindrance and less of an asset.
We turn around and instead give a platform to a 15 year old Greta who could not even narrate what it is like to have a baby and has no clue about life.
We send 18yr olds to collegr to criticize the foundations of western society. They are still living off their parent's dime.
The idea that you have certain Constitutional rights that the government isn't allowed to mess with but private companies are is well established and has been known and accepted for centuries.
I know it’s a tough pill to swallow sometimes, but best to let it go, as the site guidelines say. (For the record, I didn’t downvote your previous comment).
How is this different from them calling up a known associate and asking them for my location?
Until there is real privacy enforcement here, and it's clear that location data is owned by the person being tracked and not some third party that happens to have their hands on it, I don't see this pattern going away.
I see a difference in scale. Calling up one associate to ask on one person's location on a single date is one thing. Calling up every person in the country to ask on their location throughout the last year is something else entirely.
I think privacy should be seen as a spectrum, not just a binary private/public.
It's a shame that we don't have criminal charges for government employees that violate the 4th amendment. As it is structured, the government has the incentive to test their boundaries constantly, as there is no risk in doing so. The worst that can happen is any actions they take on such information gets thrown out in court.
That isn't a disincentive...they can continue to violate the law, because there is nothing stopping them...merely laws that prevent them from using the illegally acquired information if the defendant has a competent lawyer. But never a penalty for illegally acquiring the information in the first place.
Random question - but just because it violates the constitution, that doesn’t necessarily make it a crime, correct? In other words, the Constitution limits the government from unreasonable search, but it doesn’t proscribe a punishment if it’s violated. You’d need a separate law for that?
Strictly speaking this is correct. Even in cases of treason, the only crime defined in the Constitution:
"The Congress shall have Power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted."
...acts under "color of law" include ... acts done beyond the bounds of that official's lawful authority, if the acts are done while the official is purporting to or pretending to act in the performance of his/her official duties.
> It's a shame that we don't have criminal charges for government employees that violate the 4th amendment
We do. See, e.g., 18 USC 241, Conspiracy against rights, and 18 USC 242, Deprivation of rights under color of law.
Its just that the people who would prosecute those charges are often not inclined to do so for federal government agents doing so as a matter of policy rather than as rogue actors.
This government under any administration seems to have a real problem with obeying the constitution which tells them to fuck off. Asset forfeiture, abusing fisa courts, NSA, wiretapping political opponents, forced lock-downs, stop and frisk.
The issue is there is no repercussion for doing something unconstitutional and having a court strike you down years later. Prison time fixes this calculus fast; there should be new legislation on this ideally.
Practically no one in Congress would introduce a bill to do so because they (almost certainly) would be afraid it could be used on themselves. That’s my guess anyways.
No small part of this boils down to the fact that we have career politicians, who have never once held a real job, and that's not what was envisioned when the Constitution was written. If you could only rely on a government salary for 6 months out of the year, or if you could only hold any government job for 5-6 years in a row before being forced back into the private sector, a lot of problems we have with the government deciding it knows better than the Constitution would go away.
I'm not saying we wouldn't have a host of other problems.
> if you could only hold any government job for 5-6 years in a row before being forced back into the private sector,
It would make the revolving door situation even worse. Can you trust a legislator to deal impartially with industry-specific legislation if they have to find a job in that industry 5 years later?
I think we've jumped the shark with regard to original/founders' intent, but that being said the intent was for "legislator" to never be a full-time job, or even a job at all. It was supposed to be a public service that citizens took on when necessary for the betterment and representation of their communities.
Now like I said I don't think there's any way to get back to that, but even the notion of a revolving door situation presupposes professional legislators. Term limits in general would help the revolving door problem by limiting the amount of influence any one individual could ever have.
That doesn't answer the question I raised at all. The problem isn't the amount of influence one individual can have, it's the amount of regulatory capture that can occur. It becomes way too easy for industries to promise cushy jobs to ex-legislators in exchange for sweetheart deals while in office.
Members of Congress also have mortgage and college tuition bills to pay. How likely are they to go against the hand that might feed them tomorrow? How motivated will they be in their final 1-2 years of office, knowing it's worth nothing for re-election? How hard would you try at your job if you knew you were getting fired next year no matter what?
> the intent was for "legislator" to never be a full-time job, or even a job at all. It was supposed to be a public service that citizens took on when necessary for the betterment and representation of their communities.
Which is all noble-sounding and Roman and all, but so what? Times change, countries and societies change. Legislation today is incredibly dense and complex and even the full-timers rarely read through all of it, let alone understand it. Part-timers would do even worse.
FWIW the age restrictions on holding office are/were supposed to accomplish what you said about politicians having real-world experience.
1. Someone who has been in the private sector takes a sabbatical to serve in Congress for a term or two. When they're done, they go back to their old job.
2. Someone spends their life working on campaigns and for politicians, then gets elected and holds the same Congressional seat for 50 years.
I think my earlier comments make it clear I think #1 is an ideal and #2 is at best a bastardization of what we should have, but I tried not to editorialize the two options too much.
I'll be honest with you, if they combined this information with everything else they already know about my income, and had me sign a completed tax return at the end of the year instead of playing a game of "hope you don't accidentally commit tax fraud" I'd be ok with it.
Yes, unless you have a lot of vendor income below the reporting threshold the IRS probably has a very good idea how much money you make. Here's an incomplete list of what they don't know that makes "but you should know my taxes!!" arguments moot:
* You got married, divorced, or became a widow[er]
* You had or lost a child
* You paid mortgage loan interest on a primary residence
* You paid student loan interest
Or any number of other things that could have changed your adjusted gross income, which is what you're actually taxed on.
The only way the IRS can bill you for actual taxes owed is if the tax code is simplified (an objectively good thing). The only way the tax code is simplified to that level is if most deductions and credits disappear, and whether or not that's "good" is arguable at best.
1 and 2. Governments maintain vital records. It would not be a leap for them to report changes to the IRS.
3. Mortgage companies already report mortgage interest to the IRS on form 1098. Not much of a leap for mortgage companies to keep track of whether a mortgage is on someone's primary residence and report that.
It is possible. In Belgium, the tax authorities have all this information and more. The 'tax on web' site mostly fills in your tax forms itself and asks you for corrections. For a lot of the population, these corrections are minor to none, e.g. some of the smaller charity deductions are missing.
I didn't say it wasn't possible, only that this isn't information the IRS has ready access to for 331+ million people in the US. You'd need big legislative and/or regulatory changes to pipe that kind of information into the IRS.
I know... but for the vast majority of people, this is not an issue. You think the government doesn't know where you live, with all the other records out there? Tax preparation is a big business and is the real reason this hasn't been streamlined like it has in some other countries.
in darknet diaries EP 26 - IRS they talk about how the budget and staff got severely cut resulting in major IT issues. I think if we want a better system we're going to also be ok with giving a portion of the Turbo Tax to fund the development, maintenance, and securing of the systems required.
